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Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

Have you ever thought to yourself: Hey, so I grew a bunch of tomatillos. Now what?

I did that today. We have quite a few tomatillos in the garden, many of which were ready to harvest. So I harvested them and did what I always do with tomatillos. I made roasted tomatillo salsa.

(You might wonder why I grow tomatillos when all I do with them is make salsa. The answer is that they’re incredibly easy to grow from seed and you get a lot of them for very little work. If you want to have an amazing garden success, tomatillos are for you!)

It seems like all the tomatillo salsa recipes out there call for one pound of tomatillos. I don’t have a food scale and I don’t know what a pound of tomatillos looks like, so I just used all the ones I harvested, which was this many:

And then I did this, which is very slightly adapted from this Tyler Florence recipe (which, by the way, I’ve vegetarianized and served for Soren’s birthday).

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa Recipe

Ingredients

one pound or so fresh tomatillos, husked and cut in half

a big onion, peeled and quartered

5 or so cloves garlic (peeled or not — doesn’t matter at this point)

3 or 4 jalapenos, whole

one lime, juiced

a nice big handful of cilantro

1 teaspoon salt (plus extra to taste if you’re into that sort of thing)

2 teaspoons ground cumin

Directions

Preheat oven to 400F. Place tomatillos, onion, garlic, and jalapeno on a large baking sheet and roast for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, add lime juice, cilantro, salt, and cumin to your blender or food processor (I use the Vitamix for this because it’s too much liquid for my ancient food processor to handle without overflowing and I like smooth rather than chunky salsa anyway). Add the roasted vegetables (after peeling the garlic if you didn’t before roasting and seeding the jalapenos if you like) and juice from the pan to your blender/food processor and blend/process until the salsa is as chunky or smooth as you like. Taste and add more salt if necessary. Eat some, freeze some, can some. (I really want to learn how to can but it seems a little overwhelming — I should probably take a class.)